In Memoriam: Larry Coryell

purchase [Eleventh House Level One]

passed away Feb 19, 2017
Andy LaRayGun may not have known his was to be the last post of the 2017 <season>, but it ended up being a nice transition to the new theme. He's so right - so many musicians now gone, but their music goes on. That's the cool thing about recording music - it hangs on after they've hung it up.

I "turned on" to Larry Coryell back about '73. At about that time, I was listening to Mahavishnu John and a fair amount of most anything that came out of the ECM label. Within a short time, I had added Steely Dan. At one point, I must have had about half a dozen Coryell 33 albums -the man managed to put out nigh on 100 in his life-time!

Back in about '76, when I was spinning 33's at WQFS,  Coryell was in my regular playlist: I was bridging the line between more pop-jazz oriented music like Steely Dan (someone else may take on Walter Becker, RIP 2017) and musicians like Coryell and Mahavishnu John, who were [at that time] skirting the edges of popularity. Sad to say that we lost 2 of them in 2017: Walter Becker of Steely Dan and Larry "Maestro" Coryell.

Now... Steely Dan appears to be in a different couloir - ECM, John McLaughlin and Coryell are pretty solidly Jazz. Steely Dan ends up more frequently in the pop charts. However, for my likings, Steely Dan  [lightly] pushed the I-IV-V format far enough to the jazz edge to also turn me on. 

Coryell, however, was on the fringes of what most people would listen to - known, but outre. Harmonic but vaguely dissonant. Jazz but then again with a scent of pop - if you made it that far.
There's a lot to Coryell's oeuvre: myself, it was the Eleventh House collection that meant the most, but that's highly subjective - most anything he did is full of class.

In Memoriam: Paco de Lucia

purchase Mediterranean Sundance as an mp3
purchase the album Friday Night in San Fransisco

Paco de Lucia passed away unexpectedly in February 2014 while in Mexico. He was in his mid-late 60s. More or less born and bred as a flamenco guitarist, his father, brothers, uncles - all played guitar - some of them as members of his sextet.

But de Lucia would probably never have come to my attention if it hadnt been for his musical exploration for ways to extend flamenco beyond its traditional Spanish home. From the 1970s, he teamed with the kind of musicians that I would have been more likely to listen to: Back in the 70s and 80s, my musical muses included Al Dimeola and John McLaughlin , who here collaborate to display what may well be the collected fastest fingers in guitar on one stage/album and they do their best to outshine eachother in this clip. My personal favorite of the trio is Al Dimeola, but Paco de Lucia's classical background seems to stand out as "style". John McLaughlin's performance on the other hand carries the inflections of his Mahavishnu influence - a slightly oriental or almost transcendental juxtapositions of notes.

Although he is going to be remembered as a flamenco master, de Lucia also played with other jazz greats besides his most famous trio above, including at one time or another Chick Correa. Like so:

And Larry Coryell: